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Features
Watch This!
Well, I'm here to tell you that watches have come a long way since my first Mickey Mouse watch. Can you imagine having to remember to wind your watch every night before you went to bed? People used to use the excuse of their watch stopping as a reason for being late to an appointment.
SPOT watches
What do you get for your annual subscription fee? You will always be up-to-date with local, national, and international news headlines and summaries. You'll have a veritable weather station on your arm with current local weather, daily low and high temperatures, a three-day forecast with the options of UV index, humidity, wind chill/direction, sunrise/sunset, and barometric pressure readings. In addition, you can get weather reports on up to 100 in North America and up to 70 international cities. Track your favorite stocks right on your wrist. Daily horoscopes for as many signs as you wish are also available along with the latest sports news. A calendar appears at the push of a button, and your Outlook appointments are beamed to you from your desktop computer. Not only that but also you can receive MSN instant messages. Keep up with your favorite teams, see if you won the lottery, and learn about the current movies showing at your present location.
Don't you think all this information and entertainment is worth less than five bucks a month? Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Take my case, for example. The MSN Direct Network is far from ubiquitous. In fact, while it is expanding, it is only available in a little over a hundred North American cities. It is not available in my town, and I have to travel 75 miles north to get a signal. I still subscribe, though, because it is such a thrill to have this service available when I travel. It's exciting to roll into a new city, and all of a sudden there's the local weather and news and all the rest of the information. I am sure that if I lived in a large metropolitan area and had this information streaming to me on a constant basis it would not be nearly as exciting.
For a demo of what MSN Direct service is all about, go to www.direct. msn.com. People who avail themselves of this technology are said to have become "spoterized." Indeed.
Both the Suunto G3 and n6HR have the same capabilities with respect to receiving the services outlined above from MSN Direct. The basic difference is that the n6HR has the ability to track your heart rate and to log your exercises, which makes it the watch of choice for workout-oriented, health-conscious individuals.
The Suunto X9 is a SPOT watch of a different flavor that is wirelessly connected but receives another kind of data. It's a GPS watch that receives signals from circling satellites to determine your location. It gives your coordinates in latitude and longitude as well as your speed and elevation. It has a temperature readout and tracks barometric pressure so that it is a mini-weather station. It will even allow you to do routing and calculate waypoints.
This watch is an outdoorsman's dream and a wonderful tool for anyone interested in orienteering. What I wouldn't have given for a piece of equipment like this in my more active days as an archaeologist. Now I wouldn't think of going on a bike ride without my X9. You can even get a handlebar mount for it from Suunto for ten bucks.
If you are interested in the fine sport of geocaching, you'll love this watch too. Just jot down the coordinates, and let the watch lead you to the treasure. It probably goes without saying that the watch functions as a compass. It's even a chronograph.
I have seen the X9 for sale for as high as $699, but shop around, and you will probably find a better price on the Internet.
Other SPOT watches
It was just a matter of time before someone attempted to put a PDA on your arm, and Fossil has the honors with its Palm-driven version, which I hope to be able to review in the near future.
Timex is a contender, too
Other GPS watches
Concluding remarks
One drawback about the SPOT type watches is that they require a lot of battery power. I found that without doing anything fancy other than telling time, they will last about a week before they need to be recharged. If you are doing a lot of battery-taxing GPSing or radio receiving, you will have to charge them every couple of days. The Timex watch, on the other hand, just keeps chugging along for up to two years before the battery needs replacement.
Yes, you can say that most of these watches are on the pricey side, but look at how much a Rolex costs, and it doesn't have anywhere near the capabilities of any of the devices above. Enough said.
Actually, I got curious about my last observation, did a quick search on the Internet, and found that Dick Tracy's two-way radio watch had already been produced in 1961 and is for sale online for about $95.
A little further digging yielded more pay dirt. There are lots of wrist-top two-way radios available. WalMart used to sell one aimed at school kids for $29.96. Am I just behind the times or has this product not become a noticeable mainstream market item yet? Perhaps it could be the subject of a future article on interesting watches.
Obviously there are lots of uses for wrists, and it appears that they may just become valuable and sought-after real estate in the future as companies eagerly compete for a SPOT on your wrist.
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2006 HHCMAG.com. All Rights Reserved. |
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I'm quite certain that Dick Tracy would have been happy to turn in his wind-up wrist watch for any one of the beauties shown in this spread. I guess I've always had a thing for watches from the time my grandfather gave me his old pocket watch that no longer worked when I was about four. Then when I got my very own Mickey Mouse Watch in my Christmas stocking when I was five, I thought that was the best present ever, and I sure wish I still had it today. I can remember my first quartz watch, my first no-wind watch, my first battery watch, and my first calculator watch. I still have a Casio in a drawer somewhere that is an altimeter and a barometer, and I didn't think watches could get any better than that.
This flavor of watch is known as a SPOT watch, a term being promoted by none other than Microsoft. SPOT is an acronym for "Smart Personal Objects Technology." The idea is that everyday personal items can be enhanced with the addition of some software to make them smarter. Be on the lookout for future contributions to this artifact group.
The watches come with a variety of creative watch faces, and when new ones become available, you can have them beamed to you. For your daily diversion or for your amusement during a board meeting, you will have The Word of the Day to improve your vocabulary, a famous Quote of the Day (technically that should be quotation of the day), famous people born this day, and this day in history.
While Timex has built its reputation on inexpensive, reliable timepieces, they have become a major player in the high-tech watch field too. Another of my favorites is the US$90 Timex Ironman Datalink Watch, which is really a wrist-top PIM and more. It synchronizes your Outlook appointments, contacts and workout data via USB adapter and software interface. You can also load personal reminders and notes into the watch for things like credit card PIN numbers and lock combinations. It will time events in various ways, keep track of three time zones, display 12/24 hour time, month/day/date, and day of week, and it's water resistant up to 100 meters.
Timex has other high tech multi-functional watches that monitor heart rate, serve as altimeters, compasses, and barometers. Timex even has a GPS/heart rate monitor watch that sells for $250 with the GPS receiver included. (www.timex.com)
Garmin, one of the pioneer GPS equipment producers, now offers an entire line of wrist-top GPS receivers in the $100-$300 range that also tell time and therefore qualify as watches. One model, the US$324 Forerunner 301, also monitors heart rate (www.garmin.com). Thanks to an embedded GPS sensor it can tell speed, distance and pace, and then calculates calories burned. It comes with special Training Center software so you can create and analyze workouts on the PC.
I'm just surprised that someone hasn't make a wrist top cell phone yet. Isn't that basically what Dick Tracy had on his wrist back in 1946? How long does it take for reality to imitate art?